Borderlines: 8½, SOGNI D'ORO and the Real-Dream Continuum

Abstract

This article explores the treatment of dream and reality in Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) and Nanni Moretti's Sogni d'oro (1981), exploring in particular the way boundaries between the states are drawn and disrupted, and the implications this disruption has for the structure of the films and for their creation of meaning. The article's approach owes more to semiotics and to recent cognitive/experimental accounts of dreaming than it does to Freudian, Jungian, or Lacanian interpretations. I make reference to a range of European and American films (e.g. Belle de jour, Persona, Vanilla Sky) which are similar (in terms of their treatment of dream) to Fellini and Moretti's films. The article argues that Deleuze's theory of cinematic dream (whereby the dream is structured as a large circuit which returns ‘in the end to the situation which set it off’) fails to account for the narrative structure of films such as 8½ and Sogni d'oro; it favors instead Halpern's metaphor of the real-dream continuum. I describe how these films instigate the continuum and then explore the rather intriguing consequences for character subjectivity, plot development, and spectator involvement.